Why Reference Sources?
As you are starting to explore a new research topic, reference sources are a good way to gain background information on your topic. High quality, academic, multivolume sets, will often give you the beginnings of scholarly research on a subject by providing a short bibliography of important works on the subject.
Even with advanced subject knowledge of an area, you will run across unfamiliar people, places and events. Library reference sources will allow you to quickly fill in those gaps and improve your contextual knowledge with more reliability than a Wikipedia article.
Credo
Credo is an online fullt text database of over 400 reference sources. You can search them all together to bring up a variety of articles related to a topic.
Types of Reference Books
There are a lot of different kind of reference books out there that can help you find different kinds of information. Below are a few of the examples we discussed in class, some of which are elecronic sources:
Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present - Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert, and David Welch
Call Number: eBook
This is an example of a topical reference book. It is organized around a single subject or event.
Hutchinson Chronology of World History
Call Number: D11 .M39 1999 v. 1-4 REF (also an ebook, but the print is better organized)
This is an example of a chronological reference source, in which information is listed by date. These are helpful if you want to gain contextual information about a time period.
The Kings and Queens of Britain - John Cannon and Anne Hargreaves
Call Number: eBook
This is an example of a biographical reference source. These are helpful for researching basic information about people.- English Historical Documents - David C. Douglas, ed.
Call Number: DA26 .E56 REF
This is an example of a reference book which compiles together primary sources. 
Oxford Companion to Irish History - S. J. Connolly, ed.
Call Number: eBook
This is an example of a country-specific reference source.
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